The present invention relates to the control and routing of food and beverage orders in a dining establishment.
The satisfactory operation of a dining establishment involves a complex interaction among patrons, servers, food preparers and cashiers. Moreover, this interaction takes place in a context having strict time limitations since preparation and serving of orders must be performed promptly, not only to satisfy the patrons, but also to allow multiple seatings at individual seating locations.
Traditionally, these functions have been performed manually, using hand written checks which are carried to the food preparation location, i.e. the kitchen, where they must be correctly interpreted and executed in the proper sequence. When a party has completed its meal, the check must be accurately totalled and promptly presented. In a manual system, this requires servers to regularly halt their order taking and serving functions in order to prepare and present a check.
With the advent of computers, efforts have been made to facilitate the production of a final check by printing such checks in a system which automatically performs the necessary arithmetic operations. Computerized systems for facilitating other aspects of the operation of such an establishment have also been proposed. However, these have found to be complex to implement and deficient in one respect or another.